PST Art, one of the largest collaborative arts events in the U.S., held the kickoff party for its latest exhibitions on Saturday night at The Getty in Los Angeles, exploring the intersection of art and science.
“It’s very special for me, personally,” actor Ahmed Best said of the theme. “Because the very first movie that I did was called ‘Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,’ and I was a character called Jar Jar Binks, which was the first CGI character in film history,” he explained of George Lucas’ 1999 film.
“The thing that was really impressive to me was watching infrared cameras look at these targets that were on my body and turn them into data, put them in computers and watching it move like me,” Best, an ambassador for PST Art, went on. “And it looks like me, with all my mannerisms. I was amazed and I was frightened at the exact same time, because I knew that we were crushing another threshold when it came to art, and I knew it was going to change forever. And it really became the beginning of what we now call performance capture, which is pretty much in every movie and video game, but it also started this idea of data as personality and data as information.”
For Olafur Eliasson — the Icelandic Danish artist known for sculptured and large-scaled installations, and among the exhibiting artists — reflecting on the theme brought on a more philosophical thought.
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“In the beginning you always think it’s about the goal,” Eliasson said. “And then you get all academic and you think it’s about the journey, not the destination. But then at the end of the day, you always realize it’s not really the destination or the journey. It’s the company. It’s the people that you’re with. At the end of the day, you can have this theme, another theme, and so on, but it all comes down to good or bad people or people who have the right intentions, and if people are able to align their intentions.”
Titled “PST Art: Art & Science Collide,” it’s a project involving more than 70 linked exhibitions and dozens of public programs, supported by more than $20 million in grants from Getty. Lead sponsors are Bank of America, Alicia Miñana and Rob Lovelace, and the Getty Patron Program, with additional support from the Simons Foundation.
PST Art, which is an initiative started by the museum in collaboration with arts institutions across Southern California, has brought together teams of curators, scientists and artists to research and develop the exhibits. Open now for five months, partners are in and around Los Angeles, from Santa Barbara to San Diego and Palm Springs; they include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County and the San Diego Museum of Art, along with independent art museums The Broad and MOCA, university-associated museums and galleries the Hammer Museum and Fowler Museum at UCLA and UCR Arts at UC Riverside, and scientific institutions Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“There were a couple major cultural leaders in L.A., specifically Michael Govan at LACMA and Ann Philbin at the Hammer, who were big advocates of having this as the theme for this edition of PST Art, art and science collide,” said Katherine E. Fleming, president and chief executive officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust. “One of the things that’s really significant about the exhibitions that are part of PST Art is that they’re super, deeply researched.”
Philbin, Joan Weinstein, Maria Shriver, Lauren Lake, Timothy Potts, Johanna Burton, Malissa Feruzzi Shriver and Cynthia Wornham were among the guests on Saturday. The museum opened its galleries for the evening party, showcasing “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light,” among other exhibitions.
The project has been about four years in the making, added Fleming, who joined Getty in 2022.
“The director of our foundation, Joan Weinstein, really had the brainchild of creating PST Art in its first edition,” she added. “And the main thing that the foundation does to support is make grants. So, the exhibitions that are mounted as part of PST Art are mounted with the financial support of grants from the Getty Foundation. But we’re not commissioning work. People said, ‘here’s the thing that we want to do,’ and it went through the grant review process and got approved, and we supported them.”
The works range widely; there are 19th-century British Romantic paintings, mid-20th-century abstract paintings and sculptures, computer-based art from 1960s and 1970s, medieval Islamic illustrated books, Chinese hanging scrolls, along with contemporary installations, videos and films. Along with Eliasson, contemporary artists showcasing works include Mel Chin, Carolina Caycedo, Nancy Baker Cahill, Cannupa Hanska Luger and Tavares Strachan.
“Topics of the unprecedented collaboration range from biotechnology to sustainable agriculture, from ancient cosmologies to Indigenous sci-fi, and from artificial intelligence to environmental justice,” Getty notes.
There will also be concerts, performances and workshops, presented by the likes of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, REDCAT art center and the California Institute of Technology. And there’s an educational element, with the grants allowing nonprofits LA Promise Fund and the Greater Los Angeles Education Foundation to work with school districts and teachers on education programs for schools throughout L.A. County over a nine-month period, from August through May 2025.
